The present embodiments relate to dose assessment. While medical therapy using ionizing radiation has been a boon for many clinical applications, there are risks. The exposure of healthy tissue to radiation should be limited. To this end, radiation dosage is carefully planned. It is important that the energy from ionizing radiation be deposited in cancerous cells, with minimum exposure to normal, healthy cells. Existing methods of estimating exposure include modeling the dose output by the x-ray or measuring the radiation with dosimeters at the skin of the patient, but these approaches are not patient-specific and provide little information on spatial localization of the absorbed radiation. The absorbed dosage depends of the size and age of the patient, the size of the organ, the x-ray source properties, and scanning protocol used.
Computational models based on the Monte-Carlo methods may provide a more patient-specific estimate of dose. The model may take minutes or hours to solve, so it is not applied during routine clinical practice.